Apple has released a 17 inch version of the MacBook. Aside from the larger display, it’s the same specs as the 15 inch MacBook with the exception of an 8x DL SuperDrive and a FireWire 800 port. I miss the FW800 port, but I think I’m still happier with a machine that is 1.2 pounds lighter.
Month: April 2006
Autoshare
Alison and I are getting busy, and with that, the demands on the car are getting more complicated to manage. We have no desire to purchase another car (in fact I’d be perfectly happy to do without one all together if arriving at a client meeting sweaty/soaked/frozen from the bike ride wasn’t frowned upon).
Luckily Autoshare has come to our rescue. Autoshare is an organization that provides time-share cars, conveniently parked around the city. We are currently within 3 subway stops of 5 cars and the fleet is growing so there are more on the way.
In looking at the Autoshare members site, it is clear that the majority of bookings occur on the weekends. That’s perfect for us, as that is the time we don’t need a car.
We went for our orientation session Saturday afternoon, so we’re signed up and ready to roll. It’s a great idea, I’m glad it’s available.
Random Thoughts
My 2005 Select membership hardware discount key expires in week or so, so I did what any self respecting Mac developer would do. I went shopping. The first week with my new MacBook has been a lot of fun. Some random thoughts:
- It is wickedly fast. Scary, freaky fast, even.
- Parallels Workstation works very well for me – WinXP launches in under 40 seconds (4 Betas in two weeks! Do those guys sleep?).
- Eclipse is very snappy. The sluggish "Hey! Look at Me! I’m running a Java application!" feeling I used to get with my PowerBook is gone.
- The MacBook feels a lot lighter than my 17" PowerBook, and I’m enjoying that. In fact, I’m enjoying the loss of weight more than I’m missing the extra screen real-estate (especially with my new 20″ Cinema display :-)).
Apple Remote Desktop 3
Virtualization Baby!
Whoo hoo! Parallels released a beta of their virtual machine engine for Intel Macs today.
I know the folks at Q are working on porting the virtualization support from QEMU, but this looks like it is real. Now.
If it works well, I’d be much happier with this than with having to dual boot using Boot Camp. Either way it’s been a wicked week of cross platform support announcements for the Mac.
Now, what did MS say was happening with Virtual PC again?